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Murrel.
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Updated 2/22/2003
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Why Pennsylvania Can't Block Child Porn
February 21, 2003
First, lets get the basics out - Child Porn is evil. Its not just illegal or ethically wrong - it is evil. It takes children and destroys their innocence and leaves them harmed for the rest of their lives. And the perpetrators of child porn must be punished.
But the Pennsylvania court is looking to an unrelated bystander to correct an evil in a way that it is not designed to do. We already have laws against child pornography - there are many of them on the books. But most of our laws make the perpetrator responsible for their own wrong-doing. The basic primise of justice is that we are all responsible for our own actions.
Here the legislature, now supported by the state court is attempting make a common carrier responsible for censorship.
We would all understand that the law would be unjust if it required punishment of the telephone carriers for anything said and transmitted across the phones lines. It makes sense to us that the telephone companies cannot listen in on every phone call to censor them. For some reason the Pennsylvania legal society thinks that it is logical for Internet providers to be able to censor what goes across its lines.
The problem with this is that all Internet messages are sent to IP addresses, not to web URL addresses. Web names are for the convenience of people - they are not even used by the Internet itself when transporting information packets. When we give a web name, such as www.murrel.org, to our desktop browser, it must first be changed to a numeric address before it can be implanted in the message for delivery.
This conversion from name to numeric is provided by Domain Name Services. It is a BIG deal. The entire Internet is built upon this conversion and, without redesigning the entire structure, there is no easy way to change it.
The result is that each message has in it only the numeric interpretation of its destination - not the name format. The Internet can only block by number - not by name.
Keep that in mind as we point out that there has been is a shortage in IP numbers almost since the Net was opened up to public usage in 1995.
Over the past 5 years the Net has come to solve this problem by what is now called Virtual Hosting. Virtual hosting allows providers to host multiple web sites on a single IP address. Small ISPs may have hundreds of sites on a single number - large ones may have thousands. According to a report by the Berkman Center more than 87% of active domain names are found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains, and more than two third of active domain names share their addresses with fifty or more additional domains.
If ISPs are ordered to block a specific IP address, they will also block hundreds or thousands of otherwise perfectly legitimate sites at the same time and without notification.
In this country we have always withheld punishing of the uninvolved, the unknowing and the otherwise innocent for the wrongs of others. Here Pennsylvania plans to punish ISPs if they don't in turn punish these uninvolved sites.
And while we examine this issue we should also examine the courts right of jurisdiction. For the courts to order Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to these nefarious sites in Pennsylvania will also block access to traffic passing through Pennsylvania routing points - to surfers in other states accessing target sites which may be in other states or countries.
If every jurisdiction claims this level of control the Internet, as we know it, cannot survive. We have already had other rulings involving interstate transmission as well as intra-country transmissions. Without a reasonable resolution of these jurisdiction issues international communications will become sketchy at best.
If Pennsylvania would only pursue and prosecute the guilty and leave the innocent alone, our courts can continue to be the paradigm of justice that the Constitution envisioned over 200 years ago.
For those interested in a more scientific and/or statistical explanation of the difficulties created by trying to require numeric blocking and its actual effect on other unrelated sites should check out the white paper by Benjamin Edelman at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
-Murrel Rhodes
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